Church of the Holy Close Up

Recently I spoke (typed) a bit about War Horse, and it led me to a thought about visual currents in Hollywood cinema. That being that for all the rumblings claiming film as a "visual medium," many filmmakers, amateur and professional seem to have a startling lack of faith in their images.

Many of the images in War Horse could be considered quite stirring once separated from the image stream. With all that money devoted to nothing other than a chance at effecting you on an emotional level, it's bound to work at least half the time. The other half is layered with an insulting "musical score as emotional guideline" that serves as nothing more than clarifying the clear. The score squanders any good will the images earn by over defining them. Had they been silent the images would have opened themselves to multiplicity, due to their ambiguity of emotion an intent.

In place of aesthetic evolution, is 3-D. 

Images of Horses in Film

War Horse is an emotional epic directed by "the only filmmaker that most Americans can name off the top of their heads." 

There are, generally speaking, three types of war films:
1. Films made by those who fought in a war first hand
2. Films made by those who were raised by family members with first hand experience
3. Films made by those who experienced war through war films

Steven Spielberg, philosophically, falls into the third category. His treatment of war is time and time again, both humanistic and morally centered. It represents the type of fighting and dying we want to believe exists in the physical world. The result is a clean (even when filthy), cinematic, battle between sound and image with human characters trapped somewhere in the middle. His camera, being decidedly dramatic (in the Bordwell sense), is capable of achieving any angle imaginable without regard for physical space or character perspective. Thus it's easy to infer that Spielberg's interests are not with the moral ambiguity of killing for ones ideals, but more with the mise en scene of battle. War for Spielberg works as a backdrop, and one that does most of the emotional legwork for the filmmaker, as an audience member will inherently bring with them one (or perhaps all) of the three perceptions of war.

The film looks and sounds like an important cultural artifact, and so, coupled with its pedigree most people (seemingly the Academy included) will treat it as such. They know what to feel before the lights even dim; they are simply waiting for proper cues. And in terms of utilizing cinematic discourse as a cue for emotion, in lieu of any actual emotion War Horse succeeds. In short: Spielberg knows how movies are made, and as such War Horse is the cinematic equivalent of putting together a puzzel of a flower, rather than growing one yourself. At its core, War Horse is a "film as John Ford workshop" for Spielberg, but what he has neglected to include is the emotional build that motivated Ford's aesthetics.

What is interesting about the film is that it operates around a character (Joey...a horse) without a sense of ethics. Joey simply moves through spaces, occasionally stopping to stare blankly back at the ancillary characters that are constantly risking their lives for him. Joey is the reason for the narrative, but never its cause. In a sense he is utilized in the same manner that early Hong Kong films were accused of utilizing female characters. He is a pretty thing meant to stand, back lit by a blood red sunset, while he is photographed from the most pleasing angle possible until he is to be placed in danger.

Letter to the Microcosm

Super8/16mm film has been co-opted by the DSLR reactionalists, and now what we are beginning to realize, much as we did when High Definition became second nature, is that a film cannot impress us simply because it was shot onto celluloid. It has to have some depth and sincerity. I believe we are reaching the high water mark of surface reaction to these new/old aesthetics, and I hope that instead of searching for a new surface, we begin to think introspectively and let what we find inform our choices. For too long we have been doing to opposite.    


-Daniel Watkins

Our Two Narratives

Narratives shaped by personal experience, and narratives shaped by cinematic experience. The personal experiences are those that we project onto the cinema, the cinematic are those projected (literally) back on to us. It is in this narrative reverberation that we develop societal identity, and it is this identity that makes micro-tragedy possible. 

A micro-tragic structure is comprised of inconsequential moments that are not necessarily tragic in and of themselves, but rather allude to a much larger, unseen tragedy. This “implied tragedy” is suggested as much by what is presented to the viewer as it is by the narratives that already exist within the collective unconscious of the audience as a whole.  

Empirical Cinema Theory

    Apparatus theory teaches us that the cinema is inherently ideological because, despite the fact that the camera captures objectively, what it is capturing is subjected to the personal beliefs, sensibilities, and aesthetics of its operator. Post-production is subjected in a similar fashion.
    Additionally, the cinema is, unlike any other art form, produced and controlled almost exclusively, by large businesses operating under an industrial model. This is because cinema is by far and away the most accessible as well as commercially viable art form in the developed world. It is through these avenues that we ultimately find ourselves (the cinematic consumer) bombarded with the ideology of the "ruling class." Any accessible cinematic representation of the "working class" (henceforth referred to as the "proletariat")  is through the lens of the aristocracy, and as such, is inherently false (and often patronizing).
    However, more often the cinema offers us the objects of our desire: fast cars, beautiful women, and adventure. The latter two distract us from our economic purgatory, while the former gives us incentive to resume uninterrupted toiling; the fast car being our reward.
    Films like Transformers and those of a similar ilk are sociologically toxic, because they project onto us a series of distractions, while we simultaneously project out desires back on to the image. A sort of invisible superimposition that feeds off the capital of the proletariat while it distracts them from their reality. They are left poorer and with nothing gained.
    However, I would be remis if I didn't acknowledge the importance of a distraction. It is when distractions become the norm that such a cinema becomes dangerous.
    Through the lens of the bourgeois women in film are merely observed, and never outside the context of the hero's gaze. They are as Laura Mulvey stated "the reason for his movement, but never his cause."  In bourgeois cinema a female audience member is forced to view a film from one of two perspectives: One is that of the objectified heroine, the other is that of the hero. When taking the latter she is choosing the more cinematically dominant perspective and in doing so is opting to strip herself of her gender, rendering her yet another proletariat consumer. In choosing the former she can become aware of her objectification. From this perspective she can then travel two more paths: one is a complacency with said objectification or perhaps even less than that, a dismissal of such. An unconscious resignation of one's self to a second tier existence, cinematically speaking. The second path is to rally against that existence by creating a counter-cinema; one in opposition to the gaze of the bourgeois.
 
   Until the cinematic revolution,
   D
 

On Language

Landscapes: The Wideshot

Landscapes at their best should be as tracking shots. The viewer's eye the camera -- moving from one point of emphasis to another, unable to grasp the composition as a whole with one simple glance. By doing this you are introducing time to what was simply space.

View of Toledo in a Storm, 1600/1610 by El Greco

The Shining, 1980 by Stanley Kubrick

Legacies

TRON: Legacy (2010)

Last year's TRON: Legacy marked a large step in our cinematic culture. It signified a loss of reverence for the images of the Hollywood vernacular. The question no longer concerns the ethics of exploring the boundaries outside the frame, but rather the boundaries of life and death (time and space) as they exist in the lexicon of our language of images.

We as filmmakers and as a culture have long since been able to see anything we want on screen. Any desire we wish to project can indeed be projected in light and shadows. What has stopped us from exploiting our seemingly limitless grasp of the computer generated image is an arbitrary sense of reverence; an ethical barrier that has, for instance, prevented us from remaking Gone With The Wind in glorious high definition with a cast of computer generated dead celebrities. These images are deified through memory. A fourth generation nostalgia attached to a period in time and a sense of aesthetics.

TRON: Legacy is a step in the right direction. A film that, without remorse, has resurrected a person that existed in a series of finite spaces (frames), and ceases to exist today outside of memory (however repeatable those frames may be). The Jeff Bridges of the past is pit in a duel against his present self, a self that now preserved ceases to age. A battle between a memory and a memory of a memory; essentially a mirror of Hollywood's duel of ethics. The comfort found in the inevitability of aging in our Hollywood relics ("the ethical") vs. the possibility of an ageless, imortal movie star ("the unethical"). The cinema has allowed us to defy the laws of nature, but we are now allowing ourselves to defy our misplaced sense of ethics concerning a reverence for the antiquated. Unwritten guidelines rooted in an invented nostalgia.

When we lose this reverence for the image we can break the image; opening it to deconstruction. The creation of a 'cinema of paradox.' Real/synthetic, aging/ageless, mortal/imortal, etc. Images that at one point existed simply as images (juste une image) now contain an inherent plurality, because of the paradoxes they suggest (une image juste). The cinema in coming years will find itself as a reference point for intersecting histories. A visual accumulation of all that preceded it, as well as the memories and nostalgia, invented or otherwise, that an audience will unwittingly project back towards the screen. The culmination of which is memory projected onto its signifier.